For my trip to Denver in June I was tasked to come up with a hotel reservation for the first two nights (the Peace Corps Reunion is only 3 nights and we’ll be there a week). I have no idea about Denver but I wanted to stay downtown near all the stuff. A friend at work had recommended Priceline, so I decided to try them out.
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Spelling
Happy Birthday, Grant!
I track visits to my website via Site Meter and I’ve talked about it again and again. Lately I’m up to 200-300 visits per day. And still almost all of the visitors go to the Dejumbler or to the iPod battery pack page where I put AdSense ads. Because so few people visit the other pages I didn’t see any point in putting ads there. My pages about my trip to the Gulf of California rank very high at Yahoo (10th if you search for the words Gulf of California) for whatever reason resulting in a visit or so a day, and some people visit all of the pages. (I think my page rankings are helped because I link to those pages from this blog which is also indexed pretty well.)
But I also have hundreds of movie reviews that rarely, if ever, get visits. In fact, about the only time I get visits is when I have misspelled someone’s name and someone searches for that misspelt name. There was news today that Renee Zellweger got married and about 5 people visited my review of “Nurse Betty” which included me misspelling her name Zellwiger no less than 3 times.
So when I see a visit to a movie review, I look at the search terms the visitor used and then look up the correct spelling. Then I correct the spelling and post the updated page. By improving the page in this way, the result is no one will ever visit that page again. It makes me think that you could generate a lot of traffic by knowing how people will misspell search terms and count on them not seeing that Google or whatever other search engine is asking them if they used the correct spelling (a great feature that saves me all the time).
The Second Day in Court
My trial was today (read about my arraignment in February) at 5:00 PM. At least this time I didn’t miss but a quarter day of work. I arrived at traffic court a few minutes early and found which courtroom I was supposed to be in. People were scattered but there were people in every pew. I picked one that had an older guy at the end and stepped around him. The guy in the pew in front had his tattooed arm up on the back of his pew and it was kind of in my way so I said “excuse me” and nudged his arm out of the way. He seemed to take offense and said something to me, but you have to stand your ground early here or nobody will respect you.
100 Things to Do
This is another thing that Don sent me. I have been to 10 of these places (I list them at the end; 3 in the top 10) and have seen two more in person but not been inside (Versailles, the Kremlin). Sadly I never went to The Temple of the Emerald Buddah while I was in Thailand and when I was in Beijing I decided to sleep in instead of going with my friends to The Forbidden City that day.
Here are the Top 100 “wonders”, but Don called this his Ultimate To Do list. He has been to 15 of these.
1 Pyramids of Egypt
2 Great Wall of China
3 Taj Mahal – India
4 Serengeti Migration – Kenya/Tanzania
5 Galapagos Islands – Ecuador
6 Grand Canyon – USA
7 Machu Picchu – Peru
8 Iguazu Falls – Argentina & Brazil
9 Bali – Indonesia
10 Amazon Rain Forest – Brazil & Peru
Straight Dope
One of my Peace Corps buddies, Don, who still lives in Thailand sends me e-mails. Apparently he is on a mailing list with straightdope.com because a lot of the things are articles from there. One interesting one lately was about refrigerator doors. I’ve always heard how important it is to take them off when you throw a refrigerator away, but never could figure out why they would be so dangerous. This points out that old timey refrigerators had latches that held them shut from the outside. With any refrigerator made in the last 40 years the doors aren’t a problem though you still hear about how dangerous the doors are. There are all kinds of things like that at Straight Dope.